PostgreSQL Tutorial: Cross Join

Summary: in this tutorial, you will learn how to use the PostgreSQL CROSS JOIN to produce a cartesian product of rows from the joined tables.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the PostgreSQL CROSS JOIN clause

A CROSS JOIN clause allows you to produce a Cartesian Product of rows in two or more tables.

Different from other join clauses such as LEFT JOIN or INNER JOIN, the CROSS JOIN clause does not have a join predicate.

Suppose you have to perform a CROSS JOIN of two tables T1 and T2.

If T1 has n rows and T2 has m rows, the result set will have nxm rows. For example, the T1 has 1,000 rows and T2 has 1,000 rows, the result set will have 1,000 x 1,000 = 1,000,000 rows.

The following illustrates the syntax of the CROSS JOIN syntax:

SELECT select_list
FROM T1
CROSS JOIN T2;

The following statement is equivalent to the above statement:

SELECT select_list
FROM T1, T2;

Also, you can use an INNER JOIN clause with a condition that always evaluates to true to simulate the cross-join:

SELECT *
FROM T1
INNER JOIN T2 ON true;

PostgreSQL CROSS JOIN example

The following CREATE TABLE statements create T1 and T2 tables and insert some sample data for the cross-demonstration.

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS T1;
CREATE TABLE T1 (label CHAR(1) PRIMARY KEY);

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS T2;
CREATE TABLE T2 (score INT PRIMARY KEY);

INSERT INTO T1 (label)
VALUES
	('A'),
	('B');

INSERT INTO T2 (score)
VALUES
	(1),
	(2),
	(3);

The following statement uses the CROSS JOIN operator to join table T1 with table T2.

SELECT *
FROM T1
CROSS JOIN T2;

 label | score
-------+-------
 A     |     1
 B     |     1
 A     |     2
 B     |     2
 A     |     3
 B     |     3
(6 rows)

The following picture illustrates the result of the CROSS JOIN when joining the table T1 to the table T2:

In this tutorial, you have learned how to use the PostgreSQL CROSS JOIN clause to make a Cartesian Product of rows in two or more tables.